With the proliferation of musical databases now available, e.g., through the Internet or jukebox machines, consumers now have ready access to individual songs or pieces of music available for purchase or listening. However, being surrounded by so much music, it is often difficult for a listener to catch or remember the title of a song or the artists name. Nevertheless, if the song is of interest to the listener, he or she can often remember at least a portion of its musical melody. The following disclose retrieval of information relating to audio data from a hummed or sung melody taken as a query: U.S. Pat. No. 6,121,530 (Sonoda); A. Ghias, J. Logan, D. Chamberlin, B. C. Smith, Query by Humming, Musical Information Retrieval in an Audio Database, Multimedia '95, San Francisco, pp. 231-236; N. Kosugi, Y. Nishihara, S. Kon'ya, M. Yamamuro, K. Kushima, Music Retrieval by Humming, Using Similarity Retrieval over High Dimensional Feature Vector Space, 1999 IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Communications, Computers and Signal Processing, Page(s) 404-407; and P. V. Rolland, Raskinis, J-G Ganascia, Musical Content-based Retrieval, an overview of the Melodiscov Approach and System. 
The invention provides an approach different from those described in the above-mentioned documents in identifying a musical composition in response to a query that is a melody.